Monitoring the operational state of electronic systems is commonly performed to detect problems, take precautionary measures before problems occur, or inform users, for example. Systems that include many distributed components present unique challenges for managing the operational state of the system and the various components. Example operational states include starting up, standby, shutting down, and other states governed by the particular system. Based on transitions among the operational states, the system may take various actions. For example, the system may perform various automated actions, alert an operator for manual intervention, or generate informational messages.
For large systems that include many components, managing the state-related interactions between components and monitoring the states of all the components can be complicated. For example, in a system having a large number of components, the number of different combinations of states of the different components can be very large, thereby complicating monitoring the different states. In addition, the system may be comprised of a hierarchy of constituent components. The constituent components may need to respond to state changes in other components at various levels in the hierarchy.
In addition, the system may be geographically dispersed. In this case it may be important to minimize that amount of data traffic among components required to satisfy the monitoring requirements.
Thus, an arrangement that supports monitoring the system state, the states of the individual ones of the constituent components, as well as inter-component state monitoring tends to be complex.
A system and a method that addresses the aforementioned problems, as well as other related problems, are therefore desirable.